I’m having trouble staying on top of updates for my self hosted applications and infrastructure. Not everything has auto updates baked in and some things you may not want to auto update. How do y’all handle this? How do you keep track of vulnerabilities? Are there e.g. feeds for specific applications I can subscribe to via RSS or email?
I don’t.
Yeah, hot take, but basically there’s no point to me having to keep track of all that stuff and excessively worry about the dangers of modernity and sacrifice the spare time I have on watching update counter go brrrr of all things, when there’s entire peoples and agencies in charge of it.
I just run
unattended-upgrades(on Debian), pin container image tags to only the major version number where available, run rebuild of containers twice a week, and go enjoy the data and media I built the containers and installed for software for.I think the problem is that a lot of people are just running flatpaks, dockers, and third party repos which might not be getting timely updates.
I try to stick to debian packages for everything as much as possible for this reason.
Regarding things like dockers and flatpaks, I mostly “solve” it by only running official images, or at least images from the same dev as the program, where possible.
But also IMO there’s little to no reason to fear when using things like flatpaks. Most exploits one hears of nowadays are of the kind “your attacker needs to get a shell into your machine in the first place” or in some cases evn “your attacker needs to connect to an instance of a specific program you are running, with a specific config”, so if you apply any decent opsec that’s already a v high barrier of entry.
And speaking of Debian, that does bring to mind the one beef I have with their packaging system: that when installing a package it starts the related services by default, without even giving you time to configure them.